Controlling the World Around Me

Jun 28, 2016

Today I rewrote the php code for a wordpress plugin that executed mysql statements to output them instead (as a dump schema for this plugin tool). That was nice. Initially I started using a weird sed chain to take php code and turn it into sql. Then I had the obvious thought that this was what php was best at. I hacked a few changes to the class, and ran out. Out came all that I wanted, with minimum fuss. Too much of my day is spent transforming text to waste more time on that. Writing enough php to turn a schema object into sql code to build these was a pleasure.

I usually install two copies of firefox. I use the release version for a lot of things, and install adblock and other limiting software in it. I install the aurora channel/developer edition alongside it, and use that for testing. Both give me excellent control over my environment. Clicking to “Inspect” an ad, grabbing it’s div, deleting the code from the page, and seeing it reflected in real time is gratifying. It’s nearly as gratifying as the first time I dragged Internet Explorer to the trash bin on a mac (long ago, when Mac’s had internet explorer, it was possible to cleanly delete them just like that.) I feel like features that needed to be in plugins before (greasemonkey, firebug) are just there in firefox over the past few years.

I’m writing this in my office. So all the magic “auto-publish” features on my latptop aren’t present. I cloned the repo. I’m going to gem install jekyll now to get this to compile, then just push to the webserver. I am starting to believe that ruby is designed for programmer happiness. Gem, or possibly the range of command line tools it allows me to install, seems more magical to me than pip. Maybe school ruined python for me. Maybe python being the blub I had in school when I had just ingested large doses of scheme and common lisp will forever leave that cold metal taste in my mouth. But, in any case, clone, edit, build, rsync. Jekyll seems pretty easy to handle.